Distant Retreat
2024
A modded map created for the VR game Bonelab. Made in Unity.
"step inside and relax. head out whenever you're ready to face the rain."
Distant Retreat is a quiet, explorable lodge that theoretically exists inside of the user's head. This project was an outlet for me at the time, but I was also with the ability of OLED panels to fully black out pixels. It looks great in headset. And I also like rain.
Progress on this project was very slow in the beginning as I struggled to get the idea out of my head. But once I had the lodge's exterior complete and split up the interior into sections, I went wild dressing the interior.
Rain
When adding rain to your VR project, it's reasonable to ask yourself:
There's often hundreds of rain droplets falling from the sky at any moment, and they need to splash against the ground. This is a VR project... how do I minimise the performance hit?
This project's solution to that is heightmaps! The rain in this project uses a top-down heightmap of the level to prevent rain from passing through surfaces:
You can see it looks like the rain is hitting the surfaces, but there's no collision checks being run. This is a technique I implemented after reading this blog post by Sébastien Lagarde.
Audio Showcase
The environment uses lots of ambience I recorded with my phone.